Appropriate "Safety" Colleges for an MIT Applicant?

CalAlum
Sat, 26 Jan 2008 10:43:56 +0000

@above post:
If you return to the OP’s question at the start of this thread, a “safety school” is one in which a student could be assurred of admission. I stand by my post that Berkeley is not a safety school by that definition. I’m very familiar with the Bay Area high schools listed by KnightMair. They are each ranked as among the top high schools in the country, and their student bodies produce roughly 30 national merit finalists per year (source: the websites of each individual school, which reports this data to the State Department of Education). So to say that 10% of students from such a group go to UC Berkeley each year does not, in my opinion, provide evidence of a “safety school.” For one, you haven’t given the stats for how many are admitted to EECS at Berkeley (MIT’s largest major, by the way, so one to consider in this thread). My guess is that the number admitted to EECS at Berkeley is comparable to the number admitted to MIT, Harvard, Yale, Stanford, and Princeton, because Berkeley admits only 6% of applicants to that program.

And of course, Berkeley’s more competitive for a student from another state.